How to enable GZIP Compression in .htaccess

What is GZIP Compression?

When a user hits your website a call is made to your server to deliver the requested files. The bigger these files are the longer to take appear on the browser screen.

GZIP compression compresses your webpages and style sheets before sending them over to the browser. This reduces transfer time since the files are much smaller.

GZIP compression can be enabled for your website and saves at least 50% of your bandwidth usage.

How does it work?

GZIP is a fairly simple idea that is extremely powerful when put to good use. Gizp locates similar strings within a text file and replaces those strings temporarily to make the overall file size smaller.

The reason gzip works so well in a web environment is because CSS files and HTML files use a lot of repeated text and have loads of whitespace. Since gzip compresses common strings, this can reduce the size of pages and style sheets by up to 70%!

How to enable:

For Apache:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

  # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

  # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)

  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

  Header append Vary User-Agent

</IfModule>

For IIS

If your server is IIS, follow these instructions in the Microsoft TechNet document to enable compression.